Thursday, 6 March 2014

UberTwitter for iPhone Hands On

UberTwitter has long been one of the most popular Twitter clients for the BlackBerry, but today TweetUp, Inc, the company behind the app, announced an iPhone version of UberTwitter is available in the iTunes App Store, and it's completely free. There's already a full crowd of Twitter clients available for iOS devices, but UberTwitter wants to stand out as a client that lets you browse linked articles inside of the app. The new UberTwitter for iPhone requires iOS 4.0 or later, and works on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad. In portrait mode, the app looks like most Twitter clients that arrange your stream in chronological order. In landscape mode however, the app works a little more like the official Twitter for iPad app, where you can tap a link to see the page behind it next to your Twitter stream.UberTwitter for iPhone doesn't look a lot like its BlackBerry cousin. It's much more similar to the official Twitter for iPhone app, or many of the other iOS Twitter clients that arrange your stream vertically in portrait mode and have menu and control buttons at the bottom of the app. The real magic in the app comes when you tilt your iPhone to landscape mode; you can tape a link in someone's Tweet to bring up a text-only preview of the URL behind the link on the right side of your Twitter stream. You don't have to tilt the phone to get this view: in portrait mode you can tap the link anyway to open a live preview pane where you can see the tweet at the top of the display, navigation buttons at the bottom, and the text preview in the center of the display. The preview works with any link in a tweet, and isn't restricted to just Web pages and text: the feature works with images and video as well and lets you see a larger version of a linked image or a preview still from a video without leaving the app. Unfortunately, the iPhone version of UberTwitter is limited to one Twitter account only, a restriction you won't find in the BlackBerry version. To use multiple accounts, you'll have to log in and out of each one. The text previews worked well and loaded quickly over 3G and Wi-Fi, which is an improvement over other apps where tapping a link opens up Safari and loads the full page just to display an image.We found the new UberTwitter for iPhone is still rough around the edges, and while the image, video, and text previews of links were helpful - especially for people with data plan caps who don't want to go over by downloading image-heavy Web sites - it doesn't have many other stand-out features that make it worth going for unless you love the name. The comments in the iTunes App Store reflect the fact: most users like the app but think it definitely needs more stand-out features other than simply being an iOS version of an already popular Twitter client. Users can submit suggestions to the developers from inside the app. UberTwitter for iPhone is still a beta, so expect more improvements as the app matures. blog comments powered by